The First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly, which deals with disarmament and international security issues, adopted three resolutions concerning denuclearisation in general and the rogue state in particular.
On Friday the committee backed a draft motion by Japan calling for “United action with renewed determination toward the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” supported by 144 countries and rejected by four,with 27 abstentions.
The four countries to object to a nuclear weapons-free world were China, Russia, Syria and North Korea.
Two other resolutions were passed concerning Kim Jong Un’s obsessive nuclear armament – one calling for Pyongyang to give up all nuclear weapons and programmes and another seeking the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula as a whole through peaceful means.
The Japanese-penned resolution for global denuclearisation was in fact the 24th year in a row Tokyo had put forward such a motion, and it has passed every time.
But this year support for the motion actually dropped – an indication of the fear and uncertainty surrounding Kim Jong Un and is obsessive race to weaponise his country.
Last year’s motion was backed by 23 fewer nations, with more abstentions.
Among the abstentions were Austria and South Korea, both of whom cited substantial changes to the wording of previous motions as reasons for not backing Tokyo.
A South Korean official told Yonhap news agency the resolution “is about the total elimination of nuclear weapons, but it also emphasises damage of a certain country, Japan, so we decided there is a problem”.
Austrian Ambassador Thomas Hajnoczi said the draft “has been substantially changed on a number of important paragraphs and replaced established consensus language by new formulations,” according to Japan Times.
Despite Japan leading calls for a world free of nuclear weapons, support for bolstering its military options os said to be growing in the face of repeated threats from nearby North Korea.
Japan has traditionally been a pacifist nation since its defeat in the Second World War but support for bolstering its military is said to be growing.
In August North Korea fired three projectiles into the Sea of Japan as well as an intermediate range ballistic missile over the nation, which at the time sparked its J-Alert warning system, telling its citizens to be prepared for a possible attack.
This week former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who served as nuclear strategist during the Cold War, said nuclear weapons were more likely to increase than decrease if Pyongyang continues on its current path.
“If North Korea continue to have nuclear weapons… nuclear weapons must spread in the rest of Asia,”he said.
“It cannot be that North Korea is the only Korean country in the world that has nuclear weapons, without the South Koreans trying to match it. Nor can it be that Japan will sit there.
“So therefore we’re talking about nuclear proliferation.”